Why can anybody accessing a google doc delete and edit references?

I am wondering why anybody with access to a google doc can open a reference Item and then has the permission to edit or even delete a reference. When i open a reference Item in icognito mode i have the permissions to change or delete any reference in the document.

Can someone explain this? This does not make sense to me.

The idea is if somebody has access to your google document he or she can edit the text so he or she also should be able to edit the references. He or she cannot change the references in your library. It’s just the local copy of this particular document.

We are aware that this is not obvious in particular if you write alone but it’s the basis of the collaborative model Paperpile uses.

Using the sidebar addon it’s possible to create a “clean” copy of the Google Doc without the links which you can share and nobody can edit the references.

what about someone that should not edit the document or the references and has read-only permissions? Do i have to create a duplicate of the same gdoc so my references are safe from beeing mangled by someone with read only access.

i share your thoughts here if you want to collaborate, but what if you just want someone to comment or just view a document, he is still able to remove the reference completely, without anyone noticing it after you reformat your document it’s just gone… In my view the permissions for the reference page should be matched to the permissions in the gdoc itsself.

i guess you mean the unformat citations function?

For privacy reasons, we don’t have access to your document and don’t know the sharing permissions at the time we show the reference page. So we can’t adapt the permissions of this page easily.

If it’s a concern that somebody who you trust to read your document would mess around with the references, I’d suggest to share a clean copy (“cog button > Export > No citation codes”).

but you could make some kind of option somewhere, where you set your default permission level on references, i am thinking about something like everybody can edit and delte, only people inside my company licence or nobody can edit my references. My main concern are people without a paperpile account or in general people outside our google apps domain, i have a bad feeling that anybody could delete references.

i know this sounds somewhat strange in your collaborative surroundings. But in our environment, if tell my colleagues anybody with reading permissions on their work can mangle with the references without them really noticing it, they will become scared, start crying and run around like a headless chicken… and if tell them if you wand to be safe you need to create a copy every time, this somehow kills one of the big advantages of google drives “single point of document”

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Thanks. It’s a kind of a new use case for us and we’ll think about it. We have planned to add more advanced sharing permissions for references and PDFs and see if we can include that in an intuitive way.

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Stefan,
I’ll second Nihad_Perva 's request. My coauthors don’t want to learn the process and I don’t want to have to create multiple copies… yet I’m about to spend an hour redoing my references given their edits (I tell them to just put references in as comments, but they get going and edit the in text ones as well. Can’t complain about their efforts, but would love to have the ability to lock them out of changing references.

Sorry I bump this post as its already old-ish and discussed allot.

And reading all of stefan’s replies where the option for anyone with the link being able to permanently delete or edit the the references were discussed. This by it self is not a bad feature I can imagine many possibility where this is very useful. However this is in no way always useful. It would be wonderful if there would be a possibility to only allow people to edit them or maybe just suggest changes, or at least be able to undo any changes that are done by others, since this could help fixing mistakes. Or maybe just put it behind a password, or have it manageable who can and who can’t edit.

Maybe I’m just dumb and there’s already such a feature but for now I’ve only found the export clean copy feature.

This 1 issue of not being able to just block others out is enough reason for me never buy Paperpile or even continue using it. Wich is very unfortunate because up until now I liked it.

I understand its a “core feature” but in my unimportant opinion this feature is flawed from the core.

We’ve scheduled that feature for an update later this year. So it’s definitely coming.

It competes, however, with all the other requested features. In the vast majority of cases our users share their document with their co-authors so it’s the desired behaviour that everyone can edit the citations. If you do not want others to change the citations, can you just ask them not to follow the link, click edit, change the meta-data and click save? It’s not that it’s easy to mess things up by accident.

Thanks for your response.

Such mistakes aren’t often or easily made that’s true, but there are also things like miscommunication or just annoying people who shouldn’t have acces might accidentally get acces things like that.

I’m glad that such a feature is planned though I’ll be patient.